Intense!!!

Rating: Null/10 (21 July 2003)

28 Days Later was certainly an intense experience.
One could say the premise is not really an original one. One could even say that the film is not particularly ground breaking in the way, for instance, Pulp Fiction was. But the film gripped me from start to delicious finish.
Taut and disturbing, the film is unflinching in its buildup of suspense and in its commentary on human nature. Stray camera shots and seemingly meaningful details are sparingly littered throughout the film to keep the suspense taut and brittle as an unplucked guitar string. Swift and clever editing veers the film away from its campier B-movie counterparts and allies itself with the audiences' imagination, making the film even more effective in what we think we see. (SPOILER: At the denuoement of the film, there is a 5 second shot of what looks like the word HELL at the top of the screen - which ultimately turns out to be HELP).
Ultimately, what lifts this film out of the pack of gratuitous horror flicks and their unrelenting sequels we have come to expect in the past two decades is that the film not only works as a genuinely scary and suspenseful film, it also preys on the subconscious with that nagging "what if...". What makes this film brilliant is that it goes that one step further and, within the digesis of the film, examines this subconscious at work in classic meta-filmic irony. The audience watches this film, fixated - not unlike the laboratory babboons at the start of the film.
The film is not pat in its handling of human rage and violence as social commentary. There are no good guys and bad guys. Our leads are equally capable of horrendous deeds in the name of self preservation as are the military personnel. The activists in the beginning of the film trigger an epidemic with their absolutist self-righteous ignorance. When all bets are off and government is defunct, decency becomes a rare commodity to be bartered and negotiated. There are no easy answers here, and one calls to mind (in addition to the obvious Romero classic Night of the Living Dead) William Golding's Lord of the Flies, in which none of the characters emerge unscathed by the events that unfold. It is never clear in the film what the infected people want of the uninfected few, but that question is irrelevant. By tracking the devolvement of what the characters believe to be safety in numbers - to every man for himself, the film hints at an answer. As Satre once said "Only violence can put an end to man's brutality".
In much the same way that Cronenberg, Craven and Romero's horror films of the 70s were an answer to the Vietnam era, it seems that 28 Days Later offers a voice to an era plagued by new diseases and doctrines of pre-emption, an era of unilateral war, uncertainty and paranoia, of mistrust and isolation.
Perhaps this review has been too academic, but rest assured, the film is quite a ride on the wild side, and the discussions it has generated bears testament to its power.